There were all kinds of things in here, Sixsmith felt. Facts, atmospheres, implications. But he didn’t have the kind of mind to make instant computations. His synapses were pre-microchip stock. You had to wait around for results.
The kitchen door opened.
‘Bloody hellfire! What a mess!’
It was Ellison, who regarded the kitchen table with angry amazement.
‘I was going to clean it up,’ said the boy unconvincingly.
‘You were going to make me a sandwich.’
‘All right. What do you want?’
The tone was surly still, but Sixsmith detected a genuine desire to please his father.
‘I should like beef dripping on a slice of fresh baked bread, but I don’t suppose we run to that, so make it cheese and onion on wholemeal, and don’t stint the onion. What about you, Sixsmith? At sixty quid a day, do you give yourself a lunch-break?’
‘I’ll just tighten my belt a while,’ said Sixsmith. ‘I’ve got an appointment with your daughter.’
He went out into the hallway. Ellison followed him.
‘Third on the left when you reach the landing,’ he said. ‘If your bloodhound nose misses the scent, just follow your droopy ears.’
The gibe set Sixsmith’s clockwork mental calculator clicking a couple of notches.
‘First thing you said to me was Hello Sherlock, Mr Ellison,’ he said.
‘So?’
‘So how’d you know I was a detective?’
‘Mebbe my wife told me,’ said Ellison.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Sixsmith. ‘I mean, communication hasn’t exactly been flowing like the crystal stream between you two. Also, she was surprised when she spotted I was no WASP. You weren’t. Just amused.’
Ellison didn’t answer straightaway, then said speculatively, ‘Could be you’re not so daft after all.’
‘Meaning?’
Ellison said, ‘My wife got you out of the Yellow Pages, Mr Sixsmith. Nice ad you’ve got there. I heard her make the call. I like to know what my family’s getting for their money, so I made a couple of calls myself. What did I find? That until two months ago the head of Sixsmith Investigations Inc. was a lathe operator at Robco Engineering who took his redundancy money, got himself an office on a six months’ lease, and set up as a private eye. This your first case?’
‘Second,’ said Sixsmith. ‘I did a tailing job. Divorce case.’
‘How’d that work out?’
‘Not so hot. I got pulled in on sus, loitering outside the Four Seasons Restaurant. Well, I couldn’t afford to go in there, could I, man?’
Ellison hooted with laughter. The Four Seasons was the area’s top restaurant, famous for its food, infamous for its prices.
So, I’ve reassured him, thought Sixsmith as he went up the stairs. But why should this man, who likes to be sure his family gets the best value for money, need to be reassured that his wife had got herself the most inexperienced and inefficient gumshoe in town?
The landing ran left and right. The noise of the music came from the left. Sixsmith turned right.
There were four doors. One opened on a palatial bathroom, another on the master bedroom, the third on a room which had once been a nursery and was now a store room for all the sad relics of childhood. The fourth revealed another bedroom, probably normally reserved for guests but currently, from the evidence of discarded clothing, being used by Ellison.
The other end of the landing also had four doors. There was another bathroom, a bedroom which was clearly Auberon’s, then the girl’s room. The door was ajar. Through it he could glimpse the bottom half of a bed with the girl’s legs sprawled across it. The boom of the hi-fi and the thickness of the carpet gave him ample cover and he moved swiftly by to the fourth door. This led into another bedroom, but this one had the bed stripped and was devoid of ornament and all other evidence of present use.
‘What do you think you’re doing here?’
So much for cover! The girl had come up behind him.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I was just looking for you.’
‘You deaf or something? I’m in here.’
She led him into her pulsating room and said something. He grimaced and cupped his ear with his hand. She rolled her eyes in irritation and switched the hi-fi down.
‘Mum says I’ve to talk to you,’ she said.
He sat down in an old basket chair and said, ‘You always do what Mum tells you?’
‘Look, just get on with it, Sixsmith or whatever your name is.’
‘That’s my name, honey,’ he agreed.
‘It’ll be your slave name, won’t it?’ she flashed. ‘And don’t call me honey.’
‘What’ll I call you then? Missie Ellison. Ms Ellison? Or why don’t you call me Joe, so you won’t have to soil your tongue with no slave name, and I’ll call you Tittie. That’s a nice old-fashioned name, now. Short for Titania, is it? Or Letitia?’
‘It could be long for Tit,’ she answered, studying him slyly to see his reaction.
‘Man, from what I’ve seen, it just wouldn’t be long enough,’ he replied with a grin.
‘You liked that, did you?’ she said. ‘Gave you a thrill?’
‘Listen, girl,’ he said seriously. ‘I think you’ve been reading too many books about them poor repressed negroes in Alabam’ and such places, who get off on a white woman’s ankles, and get burned alive if they’re caught looking. You want to give instant thrills, you stick to that brother of yours!’
‘Him? God, he’s disgusting. He’s just obsessed. He once offered me five quid to jerk him off. Five quid! Can you imagine?’
Whether he was being invited to express indignation at the proposal or merely the price wasn’t clear. Sixsmith’s affections tended to blossom as leisurely as his deductions, but he was beginning to doubt if he could love this family. At the same time he suddenly found himself feeling genuinely concerned at the fate of poor old Darkie.
He cast around for his best line of questioning and into his head popped something that Auberon had said. ‘I went back to bed.’
He said, ‘That weekend, that Friday night, what time did you get to bed?’
She looked at him doubtfully and he chanced his arm and said, ‘The first time, I mean.’
‘Just after midnight,’ she said, as if reassured that he was merely confirming what he already knew.
‘And how long was it before … ?’ he tailed off, crossing his fingers.
‘Half an hour. Twenty minutes maybe. It didn’t take long!’ she said with indignant scorn.
‘No,’ agreed Sixsmith. ‘That evening, what kind of evening had it been? For you I mean?’
Surprisingly he seemed to have hit a good line.
‘Oh, it was all right, you know. A bit draggy, really. I mean, you’d have thought we could have gone somewhere a bit lively, a night club maybe, but Mummy likes queening it at the Four Seasons. Me, I’m trying to diet, and they cover everything in cream, so all I got out of it was a bit of salad. But it pleased them, and then there was going to be the party … oh Christ, it was so awful! I’ve never been so humiliated …’
To Sixsmith’s dismay the podgy face screwed up in grief. Tits he could deal with; tears were beyond him.
‘It must have been awful,’ he said. ‘Really awful.’
‘It was, oh, it was!’ she agreed tearfully.
But what was? And what had it all to do with the bloody cat?
‘To get things quite clear,’ he said. ‘You were all at the Four Seasons? All four of you?’
‘Five,’ she said viciously.
Five? For a crazy second he thought she meant they’d taken the cat! Then the old machinery clicked.
‘I meant the four of you in the family. Plus, of course … what’s her second name, by the way?’
‘Netzer. Astrid Netzer.’
‘Yes. Plus Astrid. You got back here before midnight …’
‘About half eleven. Daddy said, was I going to open my presents
at midnight? and I said, no, I’d leave them till the morning, and Daddy said he’d open a bottle of champagne anyway, and Mummy said she had a bit of a headache so she thought she’d go on up. Off she went. Daddy got the champagne, opened it and filled our glasses. Midnight struck, they all toasted me and wished me happy birthday …’
At last! It had been the kid’s birthday, seventeenth probably, on the Saturday. Friday night had been family celebration night with the posh dinner out. But the big occasion, as far as the girl was concerned, was to be her own party on Saturday night.
He began to guess the rest, but pressed for confirmation.
‘Who went upstairs first, you or your brother?’
‘We went at the same time. He drank his champers straight down and wanted some more. He was a bit tiddly, he gets like that very easily, and Daddy said he’d be better drinking coffee and he got on his high horse and said in that case he was off to bed. I said I’d go up too. I didn’t want to risk waking up with a headache and spoiling things. God, it makes me sick just thinking about it. I went to bed not to spoil things. Perhaps if I’d sat up a bit longer …’
‘You went to bed, leaving your father and Astrid downstairs?’
‘Yes. He said he’d finish the bottle and she said she’d clear up. I got undressed and into bed. And then, it hardly seemed any time at all before I heard the yelling.’
‘The yelling?’
‘Yes. Mummy. God, what a noise! I thought we must be under attack. By the time I got downstairs, she’d quietened down a bit, but that was worse. When she goes all icy and under control, that’s far worse than yelling.’
‘But you gathered what had happened.’
‘Oh yes. Well, it was clear enough. Daddy was busy buttoning up, but that bitch didn’t even bother. Mummy had got tired of waiting for Daddy to come to bed and gone downstairs. She looked in the snug …’
‘The snug. That’s the little television room?’
‘That’s right. The lounge, you see, is right underneath their bedroom, so they’d gone into the snug. And there they were, hard at it …’
The girl was once more close to tears. Perhaps, thought Sixsmith, he’d misjudged her. Even spoilt brats had feelings.
‘There, there,’ he said awkwardly. ‘It’ll be all right.’
She took a deep breath.
‘How can it be all right?’ she demanded. ‘There was a terrible row and Mummy packed her case, and said she wouldn’t be back while that creature was in the house and walked out, and the next day … the next day …’
Her sobs were almost choking her.
‘Yes, honey?’ urged Sixsmith.
‘The next day I had to cancel my fucking party!’
So what have I got so far? Sixsmith asked himself as he walked up the driveway of the house next to the Ellisons.
A neurotic woman, a frustrated man, a pair of spoilt, self-centred kids and a randy au pair.
And Darkie.
The woman loves Darkie as much as she loves anything, but in her rage at finding Ellison on the job, she sweeps out without a thought for him. Understandable in the circumstances. But where does that leave the cat?
In a houseful of enemies, that’s where. Enemies in many ways. Well, three ways anyway. He mentally catalogued.
(1) Enemies by neglect.
A cat, used to the best of everything from its mistress, suddenly finds its source of warmth, comfort and gourmet meals is cut off. Not enough to kill it, though, but maybe enough to make it take a powder.
(2) Enemies by accident and irritation.
In the emotional atmosphere of the house that weekend, who’d pay any heed to the cat? And if it was too imperative in its demands for attention, well, he already had the boy’s admission that he wasn’t above taking a swing at it with his boot.
(3) Enemies by malice aforethought.
Mrs Ellison must have been the object of considerable antagonism after she left, and what better way of taking revenge than striking at the thing she loved? Ellison, tired of playing second fiddle to a cat and in that excess of righteous fury known only to those caught in the wrong, could have done the deed. Or Astrid, told to pack her bags and still smarting from the stream of nasty things Mrs Ellison doubtless called her, may have looked for some particularly bloody parting shot. Even Tittie may have blamed her mother as much as her father for the cancellation of her party. Auberon alone seemed to have no motive for deliberate slaughter, but who knows what goes on in the mind of a mixed-up adolescent?
Well satisfied that with such a fine analysis, a solution could not lag far behind, Sixsmith rang the bell of the Bullivant residence.
Ten minutes later, his analysis had been modified to include two more prime suspects, one of which came very close to an open confession on the part of the other. The talkative one was Bullivant himself, a small dark prickly man, like a blackthorn bush in motion. Sixsmith, unsure of his reception, had mentioned the cat with some diffidence. Immediately, he was swept round the side of the house into the rear garden to be shown the variety of anti-personnel devices which Bullivant had erected in his war against Darkie and all other four-legged intruders. These devices ranged from the merely deterrent such as pepper, netting and a tight-mesh wire fence, to the captivating, such as pitfalls and mink-traps.
The final weapon in Bullivant’s armoury was unequivocally lethal.
‘It’s all right. He won’t harm you without my say-so,’ said Bullivant confidently. ‘Will you, Kaiser?’
Sixsmith looked uneasily at his second new suspect, a huge black Dobermann who returned his gaze assessingly.
‘You let this thing run loose?’ he inquired.
‘He has the run of the garden at night, yes. No pests here, I tell you. Saves on his food bill too.’
He laughed as he spoke and patted the dog’s head approvingly.
‘You mean, he catches … things, and eats them?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Including cats?’
‘Especially cats!’
Sixsmith looked at the animal with a distaste which was clearly mutual and said, ‘What about traces? I mean, if he’s eaten something, would you know?’
‘Oh, a bit of blood on the grass maybe. Sometimes I hear a bit of squealing in the night,’ said Bullivant cheerfully.
‘Two weekends ago, did you spot any blood, or hear any squealing?’
‘Two weekends ago?’ Bullivant’s tight little face screwed up like a brussel sprout in the effort of memory.
‘You’re wondering about that monster of Ellison’s, aren’t you? No, I don’t recollect any blood or squealing. But there was something, I remember. Early Saturday morning, or was it Sunday? He woke me up. Doesn’t bark much, but I’m a light sleeper. I had a look out. Nothing in the garden, but he seemed to have caught a noise in the woods. Over there.’
He pointed diagonally across his own garden. Sixsmith followed the line of the finger through the dividing fence and across the neighbouring garden, and found himself looking at Ellison standing in his shrubbery, watching them. Their eyes met, then Ellison turned away and walked back towards his house.
‘Do you often get disturbances in the woods?’
‘All the time,’ said Bullivant. ‘Kids in the day, God knows what at night. Lot of people are scared to go walking in the woods these days. But not me, not when I’ve got Kaiser! Which reminds me. It’s time for his constitutional now. Come, Kaiser. You can see yourself out, can’t you?’
‘Sure,’ said Sixsmith, watching as Bullivant set off down his garden with the dog at his heels. There was a solid, heavily padlocked metal gate in the wire fence leading into the woods. Bullivant unlocked it and sent the dog out ahead of him.
Turning back, he called, ‘Tell Ellison, yes, Kaiser could have had that moggy, it’s true. But where’s your proof, eh? Where’s your proof!’
And with a bark of laughter, he followed the silent dog into the wood.
As he returned to the Ellisons, Sixsmith said to
himself, ‘Joe boy, you were wrong. Sixty a day is no fair payment for trading with the natives of Brock Wood Lane! They’re cannibals, man, real cannibals!’
Ellison met him at the front door. He looked very angry.
‘Who the hell gave you the right to start bothering my neighbours!’
Bullivant would have been surprised by this protectiveness, Sixsmith guessed. He also guessed Ellison was more concerned that the squalid details of his private life were being bandied about than with his neighbour’s privacy.
He was saved the trouble of defending himself by Mrs Ellison’s appearance.
‘I will remind you that this man is in my employ. Mine is the only authority he needs to question anyone!’
‘You think so? This is still my house!’
‘Still half your house. Even our grossly biased divorce laws allow the woman that right.’
Ellison glowered at her, then to Sixsmith’s surprise became relatively conciliatory.
‘All right, all right. No need to talk like that, not in public. Look, don’t you think this has gone far enough? The bloody cat has obviously just taken off. Mebbe it got knocked down, like this fellow said when he first arrived. Well, all right, it’s sad and I’m sorry. But either it’ll come back or else you can get yourself another. You can get yourself a whole bloody cattery for what you’re likely to end up paying Sherlock here!’
Sixsmith couldn’t fault the man’s logic. He wished he’d made it clear the advance was non-returnable. He made a mental note to get such things written down in future. If there was a future. With only three months of his lease left to run, he was a long way from making a living. Not that there wasn’t the work, but half a dozen prospective clients in this liberal, integrated country had shied off when they realized what they’d caught by the toe.
Happily, Mrs Ellison was not in the mood for right reason.
She ignored her husband and said, ‘Come with me, Mr Sixsmith, and report.’
Meekly he followed her into the house.
They went into the lounge once more.
‘Well?’ she said.
‘It’s early days,’ he said.
There are No Ghosts in the Soviet Union Page 10